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Where Dems and GOP agree

Obama has continued to champion global development efforts like PEPFAR. | AP Photo

By DAN GLICKMAN | 9/7/12 5:21 PM EDT

With back-to-back Republican and Democratic National Conventions, it’s natural to focus on our differences. While I have plenty to disagree with Republicans about, I am heartened to see the bipartisan support that exists for U.S. leadership in the world — particularly for our global development efforts.

Through programs like the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, initiatives started under President George W. Bush, nearly four million lives around the world have been saved. Nearly half a million babies whose lives would have been overshadowed by AIDS were born free of HIV. Tens of millions of lives, including more than four million orphans, have been changed for the better because U.S. leaders set politics aside to do what is right.

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And all this has been accomplished in less than a decade.

President Barack Obama has continued to champion and support global development efforts like PEPFAR and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which demand results and ensure accountability for U.S. taxpayers. This is not a hand out, but rather a hand up. These programs require countries to put their own resources toward meeting the needs of their people.

This partnership ensures sustainability, and that the programs have a lasting effect of providing opportunity to people around the world.

We are now applying these strong results-oriented innovations and principles to new initiatives. Consider our Feed the Future program, which promotes food security by encouraging the growth of sustainable agriculture. In the Horn of Africa, for example, we are helping local families learn to make a living and alleviate the devastating effects of famine, which have led to instability around the world.

When farmers there can make a living, it’s not only good for them, it’s good for our national security. They don’t have to rely on war lords or the appeal of terrorist organizations to provide for their families. These programs not only improve America’s image around the world, but help our own safety — replacing desperation with hope.

At the U.S. Agency for International Development, real improvements in how we deliver aid have been made in the past decade. Taking a cue from the private sector, U.S. citizens can now go to USAID’s website and look at the new “Foreign Assistance Dashboard” to see where we’re involved around the world and the difference those programs are making. Bipartisan efforts are underway on Capitol Hill to ensure that these kinds of reforms continue.

Americans across the political spectrum understand we live in a global economy. If we are going to keep our economic recovery going, we have to be competitive around the world. Today, more than half of U.S. exports go to the developing world, and the economies of these countries are growing at faster rates than our traditional trading partners in Europe and Japan. That’s why Obama in 2010 issued the first Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development, which made a commitment to promoting economic growth as a key objective of U.S. foreign assistance.

I served in the House as a Democratic congressman for 18 years and was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture — and I am all too aware of how partisan politics can be. But the American people expect Republicans and Democrats to get things done.

The accomplishments in our international affairs programs over the past decade are nothing short of extraordinary. The return on our investment can be measured in the lives we have touched and saved, and in our own economy and security.

As the campaign season kicks into high gear and the candidates battle it out, let’s remember one area that Americans of every political stripe can be proud of and support—our efforts to build a better, safer world.

Dan Glickman served as agriculture secretary 1995-2001, and represented the 4th District of Kansas in the House from 1977-1995. He is the chairman of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

Our national election process is peaking with conventions and debates as we approach the November 6th vote. With the instantaneous and ubiquitous media, elections have become a tsunami of rancorous propaganda, petty punditry and outright lies. So, let’s sort out just what separates our two political parties today.

Democrats, or “Dramatocrats,” are the compassion party where everyone (especially minorities) is a victim of capitalism in American, and where central government institutions must be funded, erected and deployed to rescue you from your race, job, gender preference, income, citizenship, physical ability, geography, diet and pollution.

Republicans, or “Responsibilicans,” are the justice party where everyone is expected to take free and personal responsibility for their lives and prosperity with limited reliance upon, or expectations of, government involvement in their daily lives.

Dramatocrats are moved by the dramatic elements of rhetorical pathos, imagery, symbolism, music and emotive victim claims. Government is the principal unifier of mankind for Dramatocrats. Taxation of the successful to grow government is their way to get everyone to the same middle class out come. Corporations, profits and markets are only valued as taxable collective assets to be redistributed in pursuit of social and environmental equality.

Responsibilicans are moved by the laws of the U.S.Constitution, global economics and civil justice. Governments are necessary, but should be affordable and accessories to personal achievement and free enterprise. Taxation should be broadly borne, adopted by voters, and used only for the essentials of government programs. Responsibilicans applaud capitalism as the proven path to the greatest growth and prosperity for mankind.

We are not this stupid. We have seen day after day, the obstructionist strategy of the teapublicans. They have been betting all along that the American electorate will cave when they see all of the failures that the house republicans have created and blame them on the president. Again, only fox news faithful are foolish enough to think that the president is fully to blame. Research for yourself how many filibusters, no votes, senseless abortion legislation etc, that these baggers are responsible for. There is no way any president could have repaired all the damage he found, and there is absolutely no way any president could overcome the blatant obstructionism he has faced from the baggers. Remove the baggers, begin the progress. Don't let this be your fate:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...